ABSTRACT
Trust is a long-term key word in social theory, if less so in human geography. Its winding conceptual trajectory crosses almost all social scientific disciplines from political science and political economy to sociology to nursing, with partly differing times of prominence in each. Early treatment of trust as a part of responsible government can be found in the Second Treatise of Government by John Locke (1690/1980) for whom it was essential that officials do not act ‘contrary to trust’ (Parry 1976, 131). The significance of trust as a social condition was noticed in the early eighteenthcentury by the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, for whom it represents a link between the calculative commercial society and the broader civil society, within which the former was embedded (Porta 1998, 110). Since Locke and Smith numerous classic texts and scholarly works have traced the foundation and functioning of social trust (for example, see Tocqueville 1835/2000; Mill 1848/2006).
